Mirrors Around X
After Max Ritvo
Max’s body is made up of four parts,
equidistant from each other
as if wounds could set up a band
to rehearse evocative ballads.
The towel covering his body is an ancient
relic that once dried the blood
a mind releases when scrapped against
the wall nothingness built for itself.
That there is something withdrawing,
imagine dawn sensitive to the light of our sun
makes us observe him as a thing of the past,
a poet that understood how silence* – look
how he loved to stare into the ceiling,
ready to analyze how time*
*erases itself in circles.
While his weight, being a relative thing
also, lost its arm while wresting the bed,
we see this body rotate its darkness
until pain becomes a word beetles
bite before they mate;
the sum of chaos
can be no significant addition
to the monotony of entropy
they say but then why do we crowd
around a youth bearing so many vowels of blood?
He still has the strength to answer:
because destruction has a soul who walks
leaving poems as clues along the way.
__
Altocumulus
Language crafted
a body for me
made of constant
but ultimately ephemeral clouds
a community of sky passengers
that coalesce to give me a sense
of myself
when they hold hands.
Then I am there.
It may seem like I hurt
myself as I play
with the teeth of the world
you could argue
I’m being gorged by an appetite
of monstrous qualities.
But if I open my eyes
wide enough, I’m back
to my vaporous nature
rising as steam
from the bowl of the cosmos.
It is a child that governs the universe.
For a moment
it seems she will speak
some adorable adjective
but no language emerges
just a puff of air
to blow the steam away.
I exchange my body for a breeze
– is that death, to travel
alone across the memory of the sky.
__
Deep time
Three poems
per millennium.
Rice migrating
through twilight
toward the mouth.
Memories crystalline
in a pond
of pure abstraction.
The hunter
burning
the news from
Mars.
Darkness
kept in the vein
of laughter.
The breast
as a planet
feeding the thirst
for revolution.
One syllable
of angst
per anniversary.
Next morning
unfolding the claims
of perception.
__
